


Shivers Down My Spine

by mutterandmumble



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: And stress/sleep deprivation, Banter, College, Developing Friendships, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Humor, Implied/Referenced Anxiety, Let’s hear it for dialogue/characterization practice, Mild Language, Needless dramatization of everyday events, clumsy clumsy banter, genfic, implied bokuaka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 09:10:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20225371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: “So she speaks!” he crows. “And yes! Books! There’s quite a few of them around here. A lot of people too. You could say that this library’s absolutely…” he waits for one drawn-long pause, and Yachi wonders if she really has to subject herself to this; she has more dignity gathered up in her arms than anyone gives her credit for, and though it’s all been bursting on the ground lately she’s still got a good few straws to grasp at. She doesn’t have to suffer through whatever trulyhorrendousthing is about to come out of Kuroo’s mouth.“Booked.”But suffer she does.————-In which Yachi is very, very tired, and meets some very, very familiar faces at the library





	Shivers Down My Spine

**Author's Note:**

> So it turns out that in _theory_ I can write Kuroo, like I’ve got an understanding of his personality and I’ve been in this fandom for two, three years (oh god it’s been two, three years), but in practice? What the hell is going on with him? Ever?
> 
> Anyways, this is dialogue practice. I don’t often write things that require more involved dialogue, but I figure that I have have to try something out of my comfort zone every now and then, or else I won’t ever improve at all. So I decided on what would be the most powerful friend group of all time, especially if I had managed to work Kiyoko into there like I wanted to
> 
> EDIT 4/16/20: I finally came back and edited this one like months later, so hopefully it makes a little more sense! I also added the humor tag because I realized upon rereading that without the clarification the more dramatic/exaggerated portions came across as ENTIRELY serious and even I was a little confused at first and I fuckin wrote it
> 
> That said, I still hope you enjoy!!

Yachi Hitoka steps into the library with the strap of her bag knotted up into her fingers and her intestines doing their best to match; she is stumbling and stalling, stretched-thin and feeling as though she must be walking between this plane of existence and the one right in front of it. She’s had a long, long day. Her hair is frizzing around her shoulders and lying thick at the nape of her neck, and the air is weighing heavy on her back. She hardly manages to coax her face into a small smile as she passes the librarian’s desk and even then her lips pull back just a  _ touch  _ too far until they’re spilling back over her teeth, tugging into something that looks more like a grimace than anything friendly. Had she been even an inch taller, or if the lights from above had drawn the shadows just so, or if she weren’t so very  _ tired _ , she may have even looked intimidating.

But Yachi Hitoka is not even five feet tall, and Yachi Hitoka wears sweaters that dwarf her body, and Yachi Hitoka slept for three hours last night. The night before that, she slept for four. There are not yet dark circles beneath her eyes, but she knows that if this continues then they’ll scoop out a place of their own, little smears taking up residence on her eyelids and staining her skin dark enough to stay there for good. It’s a scary thought to have as she walks farther into the library, hunching her shoulders as she passes crowded table after crowded table, rounding her shoulders and bending her spine and doing her best to make her legs cut through the cement-heavy air. Her shoes are like cinder blocks and the old beige carpet a roiling sea; every step that she takes is a fight against the waves that lap at her shoes, the strands of seaweed that whip up and around her ankles.

She is tired. She had a test today; and before that test, this  _ very  _ morning, her coffee machine gave one last shuddering cry before folding into the soft embrace of death and leaving Yachi standing on the cold tiled floor with a mug in hand and exhaustion gnawing at her bones. So she stared at it for a moment (in blatant disbelief) before deciding that this  _ wasn’t a big deal,  _ it  _ couldn’t be a big deal _ , and then fretting and frittering and worrying away, right there in the kitchen of her small apartment as she tried to remember if there were any coffee shops in her general vicinity. But her brain was descending into a mishmash of bright colors and sharp cracks, one high-pitched keening note and bells upon bells upon whistles; she stood no chance at deciphering the chopped-up words that were fed to her by the clashing of her nerves, much less at remembering the names of  _ any  _ of the shops she passes on her daily commute but does not pay attention to.

So she took her test coffee-less. And she took the other two classes that she had today coffee-less. And she spent the whole time, from the cool ache of morning to the slow brush of the afternoon, feeling like there were tenterhooks tugging at her skin and pinpricks hidden beneath her fingernails and some big, monstrous  _ thing  _ rumbling around in her stomach. Then she went home and decided, true to form, that she had endured  _ quite enough today, thank you,  _ and she was going to use what little free time she had managed to wring from her schedule to do something that she actually  _ enjoyed _ . Something quiet and slow and soft that she could sink her teeth into and use to nudge herself back together. Something familiar and slow-moving- the sort of thing that could put her to sleep, were her feelings on sleep not currently walled up behind bricks of confusion and frustration and annoyance.

She considered watching a movie with a bowl of popcorn, or maybe starting to knit that second sock before she lost motivation entirely, or maybe even just squashing that whiny little voice blaring in the back of her head to manageable bits and then taking a  _ nap.  _ But nervous as she is, high-strung and tending towards  _ concern  _ and  _ worry  _ and  _ shame _ , sleep does not come easy no matter how tired she is. 

So she had decided to sit down with a good book and some hot chocolate- hot chocolate, which is easy to make, and  _ a good book _ meaning her  _ favorite  _ book. The hot chocolate was easy enough, even if her fingers felt wound tight like springs and her muscles protested at every twitch of her knuckles, and even if she nearly dropped the mug three times over. But the book- the Book,  _ The Book,  _ an old, beat-up copy of Pride and Prejudice she picked up in a secondhand bookstore and loved for all of the little notes jotted in the margins by the previous owner- was nowhere to be found. Not anywhere high, not anywhere low; not beneath the bed or on the counter, or buried beneath the mound of textbooks on her desk, or hidden under the clothing that’s been slowly but steadily piling up on its chair.

At that point Yachi threw the strap of her bag across her chest and marched right out the door, leaving the hot chocolate left to simmer and spoil on the counter and the book-less apartment to nip at her heels. She had had a  _ day,  _ dammit, and she was going to relax with copy of her  _ favorite book  _ if it  _ killed _ her. 

Thus, the library. Thus her current discomfort as her much too heavy footsteps ring out against the floor, body carrying her in a dizzy haze to the fiction section. She knows that every head is turning as she walks past, swiveling on a neck and directing loads of resentment and hatred and annoyance towards  _ her _ , but determination has clamped around her limbs and is keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead, so she can’t be bothered to care. Not in any way that would hinder her, that would well up from the inside out and make her hide her face in her hands. She has places to be and errands to carry out, a personality to embody and a body to keep in line. She has ten fingers and ten toes and one head and countless nerves that she’s playing drill-sergeant to at any given moment of the day, and  _ this  _ will not be the thing that sends her stumbling away in defeat, the thing that waits at the end of her line.

So though Yachi is uncomfortable, she makes it all the way to the shelves. From there it’s a half-panicked scan of the placecards tacked to the wood, murmuring as loudly as she dares beneath her breath as she tries to hammer the numbers and letters swimming around in front of her into any sort of meaningful phrase. She notes, with a good bit of trepidation, that she’s begun to corkscrew her sleeve around her wrist- that’s never a good sign. After the sleeve-pulling comes the sleeve-biting, and from there the discomfort skyrockets until she’s left babbling and tapping and swaying back-and-forth and back-and-forth, until she can get a decent handle on herself. And if she’s tired like she’s tired now, things will become even _worse, _and she’ll be all keyed up before falling down, and _then_ she won't have the energy to read, and she can't have that! Not today, not right now!

That new wave of purpose clears her mind just enough that Yachi is able to make out the  _ Au-Az  _ section. She allows herself a celebratory squeak, a tiny fist pump hidden well behind her torso, and then sets off down the aisle with a fire burning in her belly. She’d love to be able to attribute that to something big and grand, like bravery, or more than bravery  _ courage _ , or more than courage  _ fearlessness _ , but knowing Yachi as Yachi knows herself, she probably just ate something bad. Or maybe swallowed down tens upon hundreds of butterflies. Or maybe let her nerves soak into her bones and her bones soak into her blood until she became utterly and completely limp, lacking in personality and agency and any other number of things, like a tiny paper doll cut from a whole sheet-of-paper person.

She shakes her head once, twice, then three times; this is no time for morbid thoughts, not when she’s so close to achieving her goal and then some semblance of peace! She can’t stop now, to breathe or to think or to wonder! What she can do is float all the way down to the end of the aisle on feet that no longer feel bound by concrete, but rather as if they’re hardly there at all, and her head that’s wrapped up in the gauzy, thin drape of clouds. There is condensation on her neck, sweat on her forehead. She is dwarfed on every side by the bookshelves, and she can see into the aisles on either side of her through the gaps between the books. When she reaches out a hand and runs it along the swell of their spines, her nails go  _ click-clack _ in a long, jerky line. 

If nothing else, it’s quiet back here. She keeps her head fixed steadily forwards, ignoring the gap in the shelves and the people beyond, the ones with their textbooks and laptops and the same sort of world-weary look on their faces that Yachi sees every time she looks in the mirror. Up she looks, and down. Her head lolls to her shoulder and her torso twists as she reads the names of the authors, mouthing each syllable before shaking her head in exasperation and turning to scan through the next section. She’s right at the end of the aisle, near the big window that’s letting in the watery light through a steady stream of raindrops- when did that start?- and she’s all the way up on her tiptoes. Dread laces beneath her skin and worms through her pores as she keeps looking up and up and up, neck craning and eyes straining.

Now Yachi has never had reason to look for a book by Jane Austen before today because she owns most of the ones that she reads regularly. Therefore, she thinks, it is perfectly reasonable for her to not have known that the books by  _ Austen  _ would be on the very top shelf- the one that she couldn’t reach even if she stood as tall as she could, or climbed up onto the tiny ledge between the edges of the books and the edge of the shelf. Even if she were to wedge her fingers over the peeling, laminated wood and  _ pull  _ herself up, she would still fall woefully, pathetically short.

Yachi pulls her bottom lip between her teeth. She takes a big, deep breath, the sort that makes her chest swell and her lungs feel close to bursting and pushes her stomach against her sweater. Then she holds it tight and puffs out her cheeks, keeps the frustration tamped beneath her tongue and the burn of tears fenced off into the back of her throat, and stands as tall as she can. She can feel herself locking into place along the edges of her skin, her limbs; she is turning gear-to-gear and clicking away, whirring and lighting up so bright that she blinds the people the next row over. Giddiness takes her higher and higher, in tiny bubbles that travel through her veins and out her mouth and carry her so close,  _ so very close  _ to the bent and broken spine of the one last copy of Pride and Prejudice that this library has got.

And lo and behold, she’s still not fucking tall enough.

Those tears that had been swimming in her throat surge forwards until they’re right up behind her eyes, and for a moment Yachi considers letting herself go. Letting her face go red and her cheeks go puffy and snot and tears slide down her cheeks and congeal along her chin, letting the rubberbands that make up her willpower snap one by one, letting herself sit on the carpet and curl her hands into fists and look longingly at the books on the highest shelf. Then for the scariest split-second of all she finds herself wondering if she shouldn’t do something  _ reasonable _ and go find one of those stepstools that are placed around the library for people who may find themselves in this very situation.

But Yachi was past being reasonable when she decided that three hours of sleep was  _ perfectly fine  _ to function on. So what Yachi does instead is stand there with her arm curved gracefully above her like the neck of a swan, like she’s a ballerina and  _ this  _ is the moment she’s been training for since she could wobble forwards all on her own- standing on the tips of her ratty sneakers, curtains of rain falling like velvet, the stage a carpet with burn marks and the spotlight nothing but a flickering fluorescent that drenches her face in a ghastly yellow. She is rightful and bold, brilliant and breathtaking; she is two seconds and a wrong look from falling to pieces and shattering on the ground. Nothing, she thinks, could stop her when she is like this, not a comet hurtling through space, or a natural disaster, or the soft twist of some great new phenomena, even the sort written about for weeks on end and talked about for years.

Then she sprouts a third arm. 

Yachi stares for a moment, mesmerized by the hand that’s reaching high above her head to tap the books on the top shelf. It’s much more heavily-muscled than her own arms, sure, and the skin tone is different and the palm is broader and the fingers are longer, but Yachi is certain that it must be a part of her. Even if she can’t quite tell where exactly it’s growing from. There’s no other explanation- and Yachi would be  _ very open  _ to another explanation!

“You need some help?” someone asks from behind her, and their voice is low and rumbling and vaguely terrifying, and Yachi can’t help but think that of all the possible  _ other explanations _ , this is probably the most scary. She’ll take an arm growing from her back any day over unplanned social interaction, especially unplanned social interaction when she is very tired and too short and any other number of things that are piling up on her shoulders and pushing her down, down, down. With her blood running cold and dread hollowing out her stomach, with her face going pale and nerves knocking her knees together, Yachi drops her arm, returns her heels (and her head) to the ground, and  _ turns. _

She’s met with a wall of red. She gulps her fear down and looks up, tilting her head back so far that the collar of her sweater bunches up against her neck and her hair gets all smashed up in the fabric and the muscles in her back begin to strain. She steels herself, ready for the worst, and she sees-

Oh. Oh! She knows this person! And judging by the way his arm drops and his eyes go wide, and his mouth creeps into an awkward mix of a lopsided smile and a well-meaning smirk, he knows her too. Yachi stares at him blankly for a moment, intrinsic fear at someone so much bigger than her warring with her currently somewhat screwy and off-center emotions until she’s all evened-out and thoroughly unsure.

“Oh?” he begins. The smile is tilting more and more into a smirk now, his one visible eyebrow rising to rest near his hairline. “Karasuno’s old manager, right? Yacchan?” he continues, in that wobbly way that people do when they are asking a question they know the answer to. 

Yachi nods dumbly. She hasn’t seen Kuroo once since he graduated, only really knows of him because she talks to Hinata and Hinata talks to Kenma, and Kenma and Kuroo are apparently very close, but now Kuroo is here and he is right in front of her and he looks exactly the same as he always has. He's still very tall, with broad shoulders and a bright red jacket. He’s still wearing his hair in that mess of frizzy strands and fluffed-up bits that stands straight up before curving down to brush the top of his right eye. Yachi wonders how he can see like that- is it comfortable? Do the strands of hair ever get plastered to his eye, caught in the folds of skin beneath his eyebrows? Does he brush it in the mornings and watch it spring right back up into place without a moment’s hesitation?

She does not ask any of this. She stands and watches as Kuroo shifts his weight from foot to foot, and she does her best to keep her mind and soul tethered to her body. She’s never really _spoken _with Kuroo. This is _awkward. _She’s _tired._

“It’s been a while!” Kuroo grins and taps his hands together. “So how’ve you been doing? Getting good grades? Eight hours of sleep every night? That’s very important for the youth of today, you know. Helps keep things in working order so that we don’t just-“ he pulls his hands apart and mimes… something, it’s not exactly clear, but it involves stacking his fingers on top of each other, huffing a large breath and whispering  _ boom. _ The he straightens and nods and his hands fall to his sides, and he stands rocking on his heels with that  _ grin _ still plastered across his face. 

He looks very proud of himself, for reasons that Yachi will not try to understand. But more than that, he’s said something that sets her standing straighter, looses a suspicion that works its way through the nooks and crannies of her brain as she processes  _ what _ exactly is transpiring here. Kuroo brought up  _ sleep.  _ Kuroo brought up sleep, and all that Yachi’s been able to think about lately is how  _ tired  _ she is, so that must mean that Kuroo-

Is reading her mind.

Yachi squints. Then she examines Kuroo’s face with as much rigor as she can manage at the moment, watching for any twitch of the eye or break in his expression that may somehow indicate that he can read minds because there’s  _ no  _ way that he would have said that without knowing how tired she is- it’s too specific! Sort of specific! Not really that specific, and actually a rather common conversation topic especially among college students, but Yachi has no time for basic logic right now! She’s got nerves piling up in her stomach and something heavy weighing her down and a mystery to puzzle out! So she scrunches her face up even further, dropping her eyebrows low and puffing out her cheeks, and she looks. She learns. She categorizes, she details, she obsesses, she worries, she slips into some half-asleep sort of trance much as one would slip on a particularly nasty patch of ice.

“Whoa there. You alright?”

_ Can you read minds?  _ Yachi thinks furtively.  _ Can you hear me? _

“Yacchan?”

_ Blink four times fast if you can hear me. _

“Yacchan? Yachi? Hitoka? That’s your first name, right? Hitoka? That’s a nice name. Good number of syllables. But you don’t care about the syllables do you, or you probably already know all about the syllables because it’s  _ your name _ , and did you know that words are broken up into syllables on the basis of vowels and consonants? Like the way that your mouth opens and closes based off of them? Isn’t that cool?”

_ Tap your fingers against the bookcase if you understand what I’m thinking. _

“Oh wow. Okay. I’m just gonna-“ he reaches for her shoulder then seems to think better of it. As his hand drops again and he sucks his bottom lip up between his teeth, Yachi is hit with the sudden, aching realization that he’s been  _ talking  _ to her and she’s said  _ nothing.  _ She’s been standing there dumbstruck, birds and stars flying around her head and nesting in her hair, and she’s been looking Kuroo two inches to the left of his eyes, silent and still. And trying to see if he can read her mind which, incidentally, is becoming less and less likely as Kuroo fails to either blink four times ( _ fast _ ) or tap the bookcase and instead opts to join her in becoming more and more high-strung by the moment. If this continues then their muscles will become so tightly wound around their bones that they won’t be able to move, and they’ll be left there to stare blankly until hell freezes over.

Which means that she’s gotta say something, and she’s gotta say something fast.

“Books!“ 

Kuroo looks two parts surprised, one part relieved at her little outburst, face softening at the edges and forehead smoothing back into its partially-obscured, unmarked expanse. Then he promptly throws his smirk back up to cover the cracks of vulnerability and actual human emotion that had been peeking through his fingers, slouching at the shoulders and relaxing around the small of his back until he looks just as questionable as he did all throughout high school. 

“So she speaks!” he crows. “And yes! Books! There’s quite a few of them around here. A lot of people too. You could say that this library’s absolutely…” he waits for one drawn-long pause, and Yachi wonders if she really has to subject herself to this; she has more dignity gathered up in her arms than anyone gives her credit for, and though it’s all been bursting on the ground lately she’s still got a good few straws to grasp at. She doesn’t have to suffer through whatever truly  _ horrendous  _ thing is about to come out of Kuroo’s mouth.

“ _ Booked. _ ”

But suffer she does.

Kuroo is laughing away at his own joke, arms locked tight over his stomach and head thrown back, breath hitching in his chest and wheezes tearing from his throat as his shoulders shake fast enough that he looks like he’s vibrating. He is loud in the stark silence, bright red among the grays and beiges and browns; his laughter hammers into Yachi’s head and flows from her skull to her spine, trickling down her back. She stands still, feeling wrung dry and shelled out, too worn thin from lack of sleep to pull herself from her daze. Someone shushes them from the next aisle over, and makes a very valiant effort to quiet down, slapping a hand over his mouth with enough force for there to be a quiet clap. His smile still creeps above his palm, and the stray giggle darts through the gaps between his fingers, and his efforts are for nothing and for naught, but he’s trying.

He tries.

“So  _ books _ ,” he chokes out, once his laughter has run all dry. “What about them?”

And well, Yachi’s already started something. She may as well finish it. So up her hand goes again, fingers curling to her palm as she points high, high above her head. 

“Yes! Books! I’m really, really sorry, but could you help me reach the book up there? Um, Pride and Prejudice? You asked if I needed help before, and I  _ did  _ but then we recognized each other and I didn’t really have um, well, I didn’t really have a chance to  _ ask _ and I’m  _ really  _ sorry, but you’re really  _ really _ tall and could you please get it down for me? Maybe? Did I say please already? Oh goodness.” 

She winces. On one hand it’s certainly not the  _ worst  _ string of words that she’s babbled under pressure, but on the other hand it certainly  _ feels  _ like it. Her heart is stutter-racing in her chest, the sound of it blurring into the rush of blood that’s cycling through her head and the shake of her hands as she wrings them into the hem of her sweater. The woolen fabric is soft and squishy, the stitches just big enough that she can work the tips of her fingers through the gaps, and slowly but surely she returns to herself. Kuroo, at least, seems to have been able to understand her and in one deft movement slinks to stand right beside her and pulls the book down from the shelf. He holds it out to her then, cover-side up, and waits as she works up some courage and then gently slides it from his hands, careful not to let it thump to the hard floor. 

Once she’s  _ finally  _ got it (it only took one very bad, very long day, and an encounter that near left her for dead) she offers him a shaky smile. It’s watery, like the sheets of rain, and flickering like the light above; but it’s genuine and it’s sweet, and she means every sentiment that she can pack behind it. Kuroo’s smirk doesn’t disappear but it softens around the edges, sinking into something more real, more comfortable.

“Hey,” he starts, “I’m here with Bokuto and Akaashi? From Fukurodani? I don’t know if you know them, but if you wanna come sit with us we’ve got some room. It’s lookin’ pretty crowded here anyways, and I don’t know if you were just planning on going home or what but…”

He trails off and shrugs. And Yachi, Yachi who is  _ tired  _ and  _ nervous  _ and wants nothing more than to go home and lose herself in her favorite book, has a lack of sleep eating away at her inhibitions like an aphid at a leaf. So she, in all of her bleary-eyed, yawning glory,  _ nods.  _ She says  _ yes.  _ And then Kuroo’s face lights up, and even as her head swims and her limbs feel like they’re floating from her body and setting themselves adrift among the waves, Yachi can’t bring herself to take it back. 

So that’s how Yachi Hitoka finds herself following someone she sort of knows- like tangentially, that counts right?- to a table full of other people that she  _ kind of, sort of  _ has spoken to. Kuroo is tall enough that she can’t quite see over his shoulders; he’s walking very slowly too, with tiny little shuffles so that she can keep up. Still Yachi finds herself stumbling along, clutching her book to her chest and flushing red in the ears as she nearly trips for the third time over her own two feet. She’s started up a steady rhythm of ones and twos, desperate to keep herself upright and functioning, even if it takes all of her energy to do so. And certainly, walking this quickly and this enthusiastically takes energy. By the time they’ve finally made it close, her chest is heaving from exertion and her legs feel heavier than the weight of the world. 

The corner that Kuroo leads her to holds a single tiny table, round and small, hardly big enough for the four chairs jumbled around it. As Kuroo said, Bokuto and Akaashi are there already; they haven’t changed much either in terms of looks, though Akaashi’s hair has grown down past his ears and Bokuto seems to have packed on even  _ more  _ muscle. They are sitting right next to each other, close enough that their shoulders are brushing, and though Yachi hasn’t seen either of them for a good year the two of them being there  _ together _ feels intrinsically right _ .  _ Maybe it’s the exhaustion in her trucking away, clouding her sense of judgement and smearing her conscious thought, but she feels as if she’s witnessing something very, very important. Something monumental; something world-shattering.

She has long recognized Bokuto as someone who could drive a person to the ends of the earth and back, and she has since known Akaashi as many, many things, but most predominantly the person in question. The two of them have been grafted at the hip for as long as she’s known them, morning noon and night, day  _ in  _ and day  _ out _ . They are as inseparable in her head as one and two, heart and mind, body and soul; they are hung hand-in-hand on the moon, starry-eyed and vast, melting into each other and expanding tens upon hundreds upon thousands of times until they have braved every unknown edge of every unknown galaxy together. 

They are also very visibly not doing _any_ sort of work. 

That brings her crashing back down, shattering any sort of half-tangent her mind had spun off into. Bokuto has abandoned any pretense of studying and has instead set about stacking their textbooks and papers and pens up into a tower that is, from the looks of it, actually pretty stable. Akaashi is sitting stone-faced and passing him materials. The piles of openfaced books and highlighters that sits in front of him dwindles rapidly to almost nothing, Bokuto placing each component into his tower nearly as fast as Akaashi can hand them over.

“Here, Akaashi,” Bokuto says as they draw nearer, “You put the last one on! It’ll be great, you’ll see! Even higher than the Tokyo Tower!”

He shoves a textbook into Akaashi’s hands. Yachi can't quite see what the holographic letters spell out, but there’s a nautilus sprawled along the cover and the spine is neon green, so she’s assuming that it’s a math textbook of some sort. Math textbooks are always the most incomprehensible, the most eye-wrenching, ugly and inexplicable, and Yachi actually  _ likes  _ math, which makes it all the worse. But regardless Akaashi looks down at it for a moment, brow knitting itself into knots (like Yachi’s stomach), before bracing one hand on either side and turning to face the tower, determination blazing up behind his eyes bright enough to burn. Yachi finds herself waiting with bated breath as he stands and pokes the tip of his tongue from the corner of his mouth, humming softly under his breath.

The air solidifies until it sludges in and out of Yachi’s lungs. She’s so  _ tired.  _ Her eyes have begun to burn. Her nails scrabble against the rough fabric of her jeans, and her blood builds to a boil beneath them until the ruby-red shows through her pale pink nail polish. Anticipation is thrumming between Yachi’s ears as Akaashi drops the book lower and lower, inch by inch, to the columns of textbooks propped up by bright pink highlighters.

“C’mon, Akaashi!” Bokuto breathes. “C’mon!”

Akaashi’s fingers sprawl over the cover, nearly brushing halfway to the other edge of the book. The tiny part of Yachi’s brain that is not absolutely enthralled by the scene playing out in front of her is impressed at that, at the sheer grace with which he moves and lives- but there is something far more important happening at the moment. There is fate hanging in the balance, suspended on a tabletop in the back corner of some criminally underfunded school library that’s got water damage in the ceiling and odd stains on the floor. They’re making a fucking  _ tower. _

Akaashi is now holding the book a mere inch above the others. Yachi waits with her breath caught up in her throat, her thoughts working themselves up into a frenzied whirlwind as he drops another near-imperceptible half-inch. 

The next few things happen very, very quickly. Akaashi places the book down and for a  _ moment  _ the tower stands tall, scraping towards the ceiling in a very intimidating patchwork of different sized books and markers and papers. Then it wobbles and sways, leans and groans, wrenches and wears before giving one last heave and falling in broken bits and pieces to the table. First the (expensive! Expensive!  _ Expensive,  _ holy  _ fuck  _ those better be from the library!) textbooks drop like stones, landing with thump after thump after heavy,  _ heavy  _ thump. Yachi makes it a mission to flinch at each and every one. Then the highlighters follow, cascading to the floor with little  _ clicks  _ and  _ clacks _ , where they then roll a pitiful few feet before bumping into the seam of the wall. And the papers are cast to the air, swirling and rallying into a swarm of eraser-marked sheets with tears at the edges and graphite creeping along their margins. Bokuto swears loudly and Akaashi looks utterly deadened, completely defeated as he slumps back into his seat and buries his face in his hands.

“This always happens, Bokuto-san,” he murmurs. The words are all smushed-up and slurred; a sheet of paper brushes against the top of his head before landing softly on the table. “You’d probably be able to actually finish one of these if you put the last book on by yourself instead of always trying to get me to do it.”

“Oh don’t talk like that!” Bokuto pouts and jabs softly at Akaashi’s side. “All these times you’ve knocked it over just means it’ll be even better once you get it to stay standing. It’ll be like a super impressive victory, you know? Like it took allllllll those tries, but you got it and that’s all that really matters!” 

Akaashi raises his head. Then he nods slowly. Then he nods very, very quickly, and Yachi shoots a frantic look at Kuroo because she’s never heard anyone talk like that, not in real life, and she’s beginning to feel somewhat like a passive observer here; like she’s slipped up and lost the script everyone else keeps folded up in their back pocket, and now she’s watching them run their lines while she’s left to fester and rot in the tenth row of seats.

Kuroo remains oblivious to her internal plight as he scoops a highlighter off of the floor, picking up each and every one as it comes his way. He’s got a good collection going within the minute, highlighters piled into his arms, jacket set askew on his shoulders and hair looking ten times messier than it did earlier.

“Working hard I see!” He shifts the highlighters, looking down and grumbling softly before his look turns appraising and his mouth pulls into a thin, thoughtful line. A moment later he pushes the highlighters between his fingers and snorts, giving them a little swipe. “Wolverine,” he murmurs to himself. Yachi chooses to ignore the host of revelations  _ that  _ brings and instead focuses on Bokuto, who’s begun to rub circles on Akaashi’s back, spiraling in and out and right beneath his shoulder blades. His head snaps up when Kuroo speaks, grin spreading across his face like a spilled glass of water.

“Always!” he calls back. “Did ya see how high we got it? I think we broke our record! If we had more stuff, I bet that we could’ve made it all the way to the ceiling!”

“I don’t doubt it.” Kuroo lifts his hand, still with its pseudo-claws, to gesture somewhat aimlessly to nothing. Bokuto follows the movement with his head and Akaashi- well Akaashi looks right at her. What little regret that Bokuto hadn’t managed to chase away melts from his features, leaving him neutral-faced and on the cusp of clarity. Yachi fidgets beneath the scrutiny, turning her head to the side and hiking her book high beneath her bicep so she can again twist at her sleeve.

“Yachi-san?” Akaashi asks. 

“Yacchan?” Bokuto echoes. “What about her?”

“No,” Akaashi says. He points at Yachi, and she feels herself turn to liquid and splash all over the floor. “Yachi-san.”

The moment that Bokuto makes eye contact with her, he stands on end. From his hair to his eyes, from the way his hands clap together and his chest swells; Yachi’s never seen someone move with such exaggeration, express themselves with such  _ animation _ down to the fluid way their arms move and the quirk of their mouth before a smile. Between that and his bright clothing, and the way his eyes near bug out of his head, and the way he seems drenched in color from head to toe, Bokuto ends up looking somewhat like a cartoon character. The thought makes Yachi giggle.

“Yacchan! Akaashi, Akaashi  _ look  _ it’s Yacchan!”

“We’re in a library. Quiet down a bit, please,” Akaashi murmurs. Yachi very wisely does  _ not  _ mention the tower as Bokuto pouts, tapping away at Akaashi’s back.

“But Akaashi! It’s Yacchan! I haven’t seen her in  _ forever!  _ Wait, lemme just-“ he lifts his hand, kicks his chair back and stumbles up, turning sideways to fit himself through the gap between his chair and Akaashi’s. It takes a moment for him to struggle over the mess on the floor, mumbling broken bits of words to himself as he very carefully does  _ not  _ step on Akaashi. The moment he’s free, though, the full force of his grin is turned on Yachi (poor, tired Yachi) and he  _ bounds  _ over, more than 170 lb. of pure muscle layered on enthusiasm barreling right towards her at full speed. Yachi tenses unconsciously, fingers curling against her book; her morbid thoughts, the sort that she keeps hidden deep beneath her better ones, thinks that they look like the stick-thin legs of an insect pasted to a mottled carapace.

Bokuto stops a foot or so in front of her, rocking on the balls of his feet. He is still smiling.

“Yacchan!”

“Bokuto!” she squeaks. 

He gasps and turns to Kuroo, eyes bright and shining. They strain against his eyelids, close enough that Yachi can make out the veins tracing beneath his skin, and she hopes fervently that they don’t pop out.

“She remembers me!”

“Well duh,” Kuroo says. He gestures again, taking on an air of careful superiority as he angles himself  _ just so  _ to the left, enough that he looks like someone trying to be casual and failing. Horrendously. “With hair like that,  _ anyone  _ would have trouble forgettin’ you.”

“Well I’d  _ hope  _ so. That’s kinda the point.” He reaches up to tap one of the spikes- it sounds solid when he knocks against it, and Yachi can’t help but wonder how much gel he must use to get a noise like that. 

“The  _ point, _ ” Kuroo mimics. He reaches out to poke the edge of the same spike, looking just as pleased with himself as he did earlier. Yachi groans softly; she does not have the strength, the mental  _ fortitude  _ to deal with this at the moment. Or ever, if she’s being honest.

But Bokuto laughs. And then he turns back to Yachi, eyes glimmering with excitement. “You should come sit with us for a while! We can rebuild our tower and everything. You like to design things, right? Maybe if you tried, you could like… apply that to our building or something.”

“Maybe with her help you guys’ll actually be able to  _ finish  _ one,” Kuroo snickers.

“Don’t listen to him!” Bokuto cries, valiant and sincere; then his face drops into confusion and dribbles from there into comprehension, and from comprehension slingshots into panic. Yachi relates on a spiritual level. “Well I mean,  _ do  _ listen to him, you’d help us out a  _ lot _ , but we’re managing pretty well on our own! You saw how high we got it before, right- the ceiling! Almost to the ceiling! Right, Akaashi?”

He twists his head back over his shoulder, looking to their still-messy table. Akaashi is sitting there with his arms crossed on the table, looking like a deer caught in headlights ten times over- like he really  _ should  _ be used to this by now, but still finds himself caught off-guard and struck off-balance each and every time. He’s also looking slow and quiet, overwhelmed and regretful, though Yachi is beginning to suspect that that may just be his face.

“ _ Almost _ ,” Akaashi replies mournfully. “Almost.”

“Well you heard the man,” Kuroo says. He waves his highlighter claws and wiggles his eyebrows, managing to make even those small motions completely and utterly  _ infuriating.  _ “They  _ almost  _ made it. They  _ really  _ need your help.” 

Yachi finds herself instinctually shrinking away, eyes darting to a spot on the wall that’s between Kuroo and Bokuto and right above Akaashi’s head, because she feels that if she tries to look at another human being right now, her nerves will eat her whole. There’s quite a bit going on right now, noise and colors and people much, much bigger than her blending into smears against the walls, into incomprehensible, cut-up bits of eyes and ears and bells and whistles. And she feels thrown out of herself and compressed; she wants to tuck her book to her stomach and her knees to her chest and sit in silence long enough to process everything that life is throwing at her. 

But then Kuroo nudges her side, and her knees tremble and her back seizes up and she bites the inside of her cheek. Her brain twists itself into distress, folding and flipping from one extreme to another as she runs hot in the face and cold through her chest, exhausted enough in body to drag her feet when she walks but wide awake in mind. Her thoughts race from her nose to the top of her skull, pinging around off the bone and whipping from this way to that. She feels herself speaking before she hears; 

“Yep!” she squeaks. “I mean yes! Sure! I’ll help!”

Bokuto, Kuroo, and Akaashi, who’s still at the table and still looking tired, turn to look at her and she feels fear stick stubborn to the roof of her mouth. But then Bokuto claps a hand on her shoulder and smiles, with his mouth and his eyes and the whole of his face, and whatever worries she had been dredging up are banished in one great big fiery crash. He is very, very warm.

“There you have it!” he says. His hand remains on her shoulder even as Kuroo nudges her again, not  _ harder  _ exactly but with more conviction, more direction. “Off we go, Yacchan! We’ve got a tower to build!”

“Don’t crowd her,” Akaashi calls. He’s begun to gather up their mess, placing the books into an orderly pile and the papers to their left and then the highlighters in a long line that’s dictated by some arbitrary, convoluted system that Yachi can’t quite make sense of. Given time, she’s sure, it would make sense; but her head’s back in the clouds, and the only thing that’s really keeping her anchored is Kuroo at her heels and Bokuto at her side. The excitement of having walked here, of having met people, at having spoken and walked and  _ existed  _ in a public space is catching up to her, and the exhaustion is crashing back in full force. Her skin feels sticky and warm, uncomfortable against the scratch of wool, and the sweat from her palms is leaving handprints in the cover of her book. 

She is still tired. But even against the rearing of her fear and the raving of her nerves, Yachi finds that- and this is really very strange- she  _ wants  _ to be here. She  _ wants  _ to get to know these people all over again and even better this time through; she wants to read her book, and she wants to sleep, and she wants to sprawl over her desk with her cheek pressed to the wood and cry for a day or two or three, but she doesn’t want to be  _ alone.  _ What she wants is to push discomfort from her mind and overcome adversary, to be happy and well-rested and capable. She wants to build dumb towers out of material that towers should not be made of; she wants to laugh loud and ugly, and she wants to make dumb jokes, and she wants to be herself unadulterated, as shamelessly and unabashedly as she can manage.

_ Goodness _ , if she’s thinking in dramatics and absolutes like that than she really must be tired. So much so that if her foot catches on the carpet and she falls, she will shatter like glass. So much so that she feels light and airy, like her skin is paper poked with holes and she has cotton-candy limbs and a spun-sugar heart and a soul made of feathers.

And she can’t think straight. Can’t concentrate.

“Bro,” Bokuto says over her head and he begins to shepherd her to their table. She hears him halfway, like his voice is streaming through one ear and sliding out the other, leaving behind a vague imprint of words scattered through her skull. “You look like Wolverine.”

“Don’t I?” 

“ _ Absolutely _ . Like I’d watch a movie where you played him and everything. And like hypothetically or theoretically or whatever, I might even actually enjoy it!”

“Oof.” Kuroo winces and laughs a bit, mock-glaring. Yachi still can’t quite parse her surroundings, their conversation. She is slurring her steps and bubbling along, mixing the order of sentences in her head, stuttering on every other syllable and breaking words along their vowels. 

“No wait, no wait I  _ meant  _ it,” Bokuto insists. “That wasn’t supposed to be rude, so don’t act like it was! Tell ‘em, Yacchan! Help me out! He won’t stop groaning about this otherwise!”

“Um,” Yachi says. They’ve reached the table, now. She’s corralled into the chair on Akaashi’s left, and the table really is even smaller up close; when Kuroo drops into the chair in her other side, their knees brush. Her elbow is knocking into Akaashi’s, and her shoes brush against Bokuto’s sneakers.

“Stop harassing her,” Akaashi scolds. “Both of you.”

“We’re having a  _ civilized  _ conversation,” Kuroo says. He drops his highlighters smack on top of the already organized piles; Akaashi looks positively scandalized.

“No conversation with  _ you  _ is ever civilized,” he snipes back, already reaching for the highlighters. Kuroo is sits bug-eyed and still at that, so taken aback that Yachi swears she can see the gears clicking away inside of his head.

Bokuto looks thrilled. His eyes are bouncing back-and-forth like he’s watching a tennis match, or a car wreck, or maybe even a  _ ping-pong game.  _ Yachi doesn’t feel like Bokuto’s the sort of person to care about what sort of simile she applies to him, but at the same time she won’t be able to rest until she gets a decent handle on the situation and the right simile is  _ necessary _ for that. And right now, when Akaashi is still staring daggers and Kuroo is grinning in a way that no person should, Yachi could really use a  _ decent handle on the situation! _

“You’ve  _ killed  _ me,” Kuroo (finally!) deadpans. He places a hand over his heart, voice broken by withheld bits of laughter as he struggles to keep a straight face. “Shot me through the heart and left me for dead, Akaashi.  _ Look  _ at me. Look at what you’ve done.”

“Hmmm,” Akaashi says, and look at Kuroo he does, up and down and back again until there’s no light left in his eyes and Yachi thinks that she might die here before he says another word. Then he turns back to his work, face unchanged and the rest of him, soul and heart and so on and so forth, similarly unmoved. “No thanks.”

And thus, for the second time in these past five minutes, Kuroo is at a loss.

Bokuto laughs softly. Then Bokuto laughs  _ loudly.  _ That seems to jerk Kuroo out of it as he whips around to glare at him, though the effect is somewhat lessened by the way his hair is puffing like the tail of an angry cat. 

“Who’s side are you  _ on _ ?” he hisses.

Bokuto solemnly places one hand on Kuroo’s shoulder. Next is the other one on the other shoulder, though it’s  _ just  _ enough father to the right than the first one to make the whole scene look horribly unbalanced. It’s all very dramatic, very involved; Yachi wonders if either of them would be open to some constructive criticism.

“The  _ winning  _ one.”

There’s a beat or two where they all sit in silence, all four of them in tense, quiet harmony, before Bokuto breaks into a smile and starts laughing, the full-bodied, from the stomach sort that has him kicking his legs against Yachi’s and nearly smacking his forehead on the table. Kuroo follows next with his loud, broken laughter, and even Akaashi joins in, mouth pressed into a thin line and shoulders shaking as his eyes squeeze shut.

And Yachi, with her eyelids heavy and her heart racing and her book clutched between her fingers, with her nerves tap-dancing and her exhaustion swelling and her hopelessness on the upswing-

Yachi laughs too. And she keeps laughing. Even tired and lost, wrung out like an old dishrag, she laughs.

And maybe she won’t get to read her book today; but maybe,  _ maybe,  _ this will be just as good. Maybe,  _ maybe  _ she’ll have fun, and she’ll fit herself into this group of friends, and she’ll pull herself back into working order. Maybe, maybe.

  
  
  
  


(And maybe,  _ maybe  _ she falls asleep ten minutes in, pillowed on Akaashi’s arm with her head resting in the dip between his shoulder and neck, and maybe, maybe the incident is never brought up again. Ever.

Maybe.)

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you made it this far! I love hearing from you guys, and feedback does wonders for motivation!
> 
> Now regarding a Yachi and Kuroo friendship, which is something I personally am very passionate about, I just feel like once Yachi got over her initial fear they would get along very well. They’re both very intelligent, determined to do their best if nothing else; Kuroo’s tendency towards provocation always makes for a fun interaction, and I feel like the timidity that he tended towards when he was younger would be something that he would see mirrored in Yachi, and that he therefore would be understanding of the way that so many things lie _beyond_ that. There’s so much potential, and I wanted to explore that even if it was in a very cursory sort of way


End file.
